Professor Tate on Incentive Trusts
Joshua Tate (SMU) has just published “Conditional Love: Incentive Trusts and the Inflexibility Problem,” the Real Property, Probate, and Trust Journal. Here’s the abstract:
This Article examines the contemporaryphenomenon of incentive trusts: trusts that use money to encourage ordiscourage certain behaviors. Using evidence from Internet websites,practitioner articles, and newspaper articles, the Article considersthe likely provisions that a typical incentive trust might have, andexplains how such trusts might lead to a problem of inflexibility whenthey are not drafted so as to take into account the possibility ofchanged circumstances. The Article also examines current law regardingtrust modification and termination as well as recent reform proposals,and suggests some alternatives that might better take into account theparticular characteristics of incentive trusts.